But Number the Stars seems to have acquired its own long and
vibrant life; not a day goes by that I don’t hear from a passionate reader of the book—some of them parents who remember it from their childhood and are now reading it with their own children.

"Vibrant" also means "of sounds that are strong and resonating" and "of colors that are bright and striking"--these definitions are fitting descriptions of the powerful words and images Lowry created in a novel that was first published in 1989 and continues to this day to come alive in the hands of children and their parents.

We both love thinking of the children reading the story today, coming to it for the first time and realizing that once, for a brief time and in a small place, a group of
prejudice-free people honored the humanity of others.

Annemarie Johansen is a child of my imagination, though she grew there from the stories told to me by my friend Annelise Platt, to whom this book is
dedicated, who was herself a child in Copenhagen during the long years of the German occupation.

Visible on almost every street corner, always armed and spit-shined, they controlled the newspapers, the rail system, the government, schools, and hospitals, and the day-to-day existence of the Danish people.

It is true that he rode alone on his horse from the palace every morning, unguarded, and greeted his people; and though it seems so charming as to be a flight of author’s
fancy, the story that Papa told Annemarie, of the soldier who asked the Danish teenager, “Who is that man?”—that story is recorded in one of the documents that still remain from that time.

They created a powerful powder composed of dried rabbit’s blood and cocaine; the blood attracted the dogs, and when they sniffed at it, the cocaine numbed their noses and destroyed,
temporarily, their sense of smell.

In reading of the Resistance leaders in Denmark, I came across an account of a young man named Kim Malthe-Bruun, who was
eventually captured and executed by the Nazis when he was only twenty-one years old.

. . . and I want you all to remember—that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an
ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one.